More From Our Partners

“Except for a business trip to Houston and a stint that I spent in the hospital for 10 days, I can say that in 30 years those are the only times we have not been together,” said Jon Eickoff.

That stint in the hospital was due to a heart attack Jon suffered while being the CEO of a fast-paced, successful engineering-services company that he managed with Susie. The couple say they decided just years afterward that it was time to leave the “pressure-cooker” career and trade it in for a slower-paced ranching life near Faywood, New Mexico.

“Being out here in a beautiful place with beautiful scenery and around some nice docile animals, it’s a nice place to be,” said Jon Eickoff.

Those animals are criollo cattle.

Susie Eickoff says while trying to decide on a cattle breed, they watched as ranching friends struggled during New Mexico’s recent drought.

“Friends of ours had a large cattle ranch and they were selling off their cattle because there was no grass for the cattle, there was no water for the cattle, it was very, very severe on them,” she said.

The Eickoffs say they came across research being done on criollo cattle at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Jornada Experimental Range that showed the breed could adapt to the arid desert environment in southwest New Mexico.

“This is a sustainable animal.”

Susie Eickoff says they read up on a lot of the studies being done on the criollo before selecting a breed that has been in the region for hundreds of years.

“This is a sustainable animal. It requires less food, less supplementation, less water, all of those things that the British breeds require more of,” she said.

She says that once a rancher goes through the struggles of drought, it’s very difficult to go through it again.

“They can survive these droughts and you know, it will get us through the tough times,” she said.

Jon Eickoff says that they are lucky to have 141 acres of land with irrigable water.

“Water is a premium in this part of the country,” he said.

How much of a premium? Research published in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Research Letters found one in 30 wells in the West is probably dry. The study by Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, looked at data in 17 Western states covering more than 2 million groundwater wells.

In eastern New Mexico, there is concern in Curry and Roosevelt Counties about increased use of the Ogallala Aquifer.

Alex Rinehart, a hydrogeologist with the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, says he worries about the lack of recharge to the aquifer.

“Even if the drought reverses and we end up in wet period for a while, it’s not really going to change anything,” said Rinehart.

Rinehart says officials are looking into piping in water to the area as a solution.

As for a possible solution for ranchers facing drought, researchers at the USDA’s Jornada Experimental Range north of Las Cruces continue their work on the criollo.

Alfredo Gonzalez, an animal scientist at the range, drives out to check on a group of criollo cattle on the range in a pasture that he says is around 6,000 acres.

Gonzalez is comparing how this group of criollo compares to a group of Angus and Hereford crossbred to see how the cattle respond to the desert temperatures.

“They seem better adapted to the hot temperatures,” said Gonzalez.

“I think this is good for the remediation of our grasslands.”

Gonzalez says not only does the criollo thrive in the desert temperatures, but by monitoring the cattle with GPS tracking collars, they found the breed can travel further from water.

“We’ve found that they go days more without water, again, they are responding by going out further and so they distribute a lot better than the Angus. So those are things that the researchers are continuing to collect data on the breed,” said Gonzalez.

That data also includes understanding the criollo’s diet better. He says the breed is helping restore grasslands that have disappeared due to overgrazing in the state.

“So with them using these areas a lot better, a lot more diverse plants, [then] they’re utilizing water in a better manner,” Gonzalez said. “I think this is good for the remediation of our grasslands.”

The Eickoffs say the breed of cattle has improved the grasslands on their ranch.

The Eickoffs also say criollos birth more easily—they’ve never had to pull a calf—and the breed seems to be great at avoiding disease. It’s another insurance policy for this three-person ranching operation facing conditions that ranchers in the West continue to deal with.

“I’m not a pessimist, I’m just a disillusioned optimist. It’s really difficult to look into the negative side of things, but if it does go negative, I’m sure going to be glad there is going to be criollos around,” said Jon Eickoff.

About the Author

Most Popular

The revolutionary ideals of Black Panther’s profound and complex villain have been twisted into a desire for hegemony.

The following article contains major spoilers.

Black Panther is a love letter to people of African descent all over the world. Its actors, its costume design, its music, and countless other facets of the film are drawn from all over the continent and its diaspora, in a science-fiction celebration of the imaginary country of Wakanda, a high-tech utopia that is a fictive manifestation of African potential unfettered by slavery and colonialism.

But it is first and foremost an African American love letter, and as such it is consumed with The Void, the psychic and cultural wound caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the loss of life, culture, language, and history that could never be restored. It is the attempt to penetrate The Void that brought us Alex Haley’s Roots, that draws thousands of African Americans across the ocean to visit West Africa every year, that left me crumpled on the rocks outside the Door of No Return at Gorée Island’s slave house as I stared out over a horizon that my ancestors might have traversed once and forever. Because all they have was lost to The Void, I can never know who they were, and neither can anyone else.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms.

A week after 17 people were murdered in a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, teenagers across South Florida, in areas near Washington, D.C., and in other parts of the United States walked out of their classrooms to stage protests against the horror of school shootings and to advocate for gun law reforms. Student survivors of the attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School traveled to their state Capitol to attend a rally, meet with legislators, and urge them to do anything they can to make their lives safer. These teenagers are speaking clearly for themselves on social media, speaking loudly to the media, and they are speaking straight to those in power—challenging lawmakers to end the bloodshed with their “#NeverAgain” movement.

In Cyprus, Estonia, the United Arab Emirates, and elsewhere, passports can now be bought and sold.

“If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what citizenship means,” the British prime minister, Theresa May, declared in October 2016. Not long after, at his first postelection rally, Donald Trump asserted, “There is no global anthem. No global currency. No certificate of global citizenship. We pledge allegiance to one flag and that flag is the American flag.” And in Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has increased his national-conservative party’s popularity with statements like “all the terrorists are basically migrants” and “the best migrant is the migrant who does not come.”

Citizenship and its varying legal definition has become one of the key battlegrounds of the 21st century, as nations attempt to stake out their power in a G-Zero, globalized world, one increasingly defined by transnational, borderless trade and liquid, virtual finance. In a climate of pervasive nationalism, jingoism, xenophobia, and ever-building resentment toward those who move, it’s tempting to think that doing so would become more difficult. But alongside the rise of populist, identitarian movements across the globe, identity itself is being virtualized, too. It no longer needs to be tied to place or nation to function in the global marketplace.

Deputy Attorney General Ron Rosenstein flew to Seattle for a press conference at which he announced little, but may have said a great deal.

Back in the fall of 2001, exactly one month after the 9/11 attacks, a lawyer in Seattle named Tom Wales was murdered as he worked alone at his home computer at night. Someone walked into the yard of Wales’s house in the Queen Anne Hill neighborhood of Seattle, careful to avoid sensors that would have set off flood lights in the yard, and fired several times through a basement window, hitting Wales as he sat at his desk. Wales survived long enough to make a call to 911 and died soon afterwards. He was 49, divorced, with two children in their 20s.

The crime was huge and dismaying news in Seattle, where Wales was a prominent, respected, and widely liked figure. As a young lawyer in the early 1980s he had left a potentially lucrative path with a New York law firm to come to Seattle and work as an assistant U.S. attorney, or federal prosecutor. That role, which he was still performing at the time of his death, mainly involved prosecuting fraud cases. In his off-duty hours, Wales had become a prominent gun-control advocate. From the time of his death onward, the circumstances of the killing—deliberate, planned, nothing like a robbery or a random tragedy—and the prominence of his official crime-fighting record and unofficial advocacy role led to widespread assumption that his death was a retaliatory “hit.” The Justice Department considers him the first and only U.S. prosecutor to have been killed in the line of duty.

The president’s son is selling luxury condos and making a foreign-policy speech.

Who does Donald Trump Jr. speak for?

Does the president’s son speak for the Trump Organization as he promotes luxury apartments in India? Does he speak for himself when he dines with investors in the projects? Does he speak for the Trump administration as he makes a foreign-policy speech in Mumbai on Friday?

“When these sons go around all over the world talking about, one, Trump business deals and, two, … apparently giving speeches on some United States government foreign policy, they are strongly suggesting a linkage between the two,” Richard Painter, President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer who is a professor of law at the University of Minnesota, told me. “Somebody, somewhere is going to cross the line into suggesting a quid pro quo.”

On Tuesday, the district attorney in Durham, North Carolina, dismissed all remaining charges in the August case. What does that mean for the future of statues around the country?

DURHAM, N.C.—“Let me be clear, no one is getting away with what happened.”

That was Durham County Sheriff Mike Andrews’s warning on August 15, 2017. The day before, a protest had formed on the lawn outside the county offices in an old courthouse. In more or less broad daylight, some demonstrators had leaned a ladder against the plinth, reading, “In memory of the boys who wore the gray,” and looped a strap around it. Then the crowd pulled down the statue, and it crumpled cheaply on the grass. It was a brazen act, witnessed by dozens of people, some of them filming on cell phones.

Andrews was wrong. On Tuesday, a day after a judge dismissed charges against two defendants and acquitted a third, Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announced the state was in effect surrendering, dismissing charges against six other defendants.

The path to its revival lies in self-sacrifice, and in placing collective interests ahead of the narrowly personal.

The death of liberalism constitutes the publishing world’s biggest mass funeral since the death of God half a century ago. Some authors, like conservative philosopher Patrick Deneen, of Why Liberalism Failed, have come to bury yesterday’s dogma. Others, like Edward Luce (The Retreat of Western Liberalism), Mark Lilla (The Once and Future Liberal), and Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (How Democracies Die) come rather to praise. I’m in the latter group; the title-in-my-head of the book I’m now writing is What Was Liberalism.

But perhaps, like God, liberalism has been buried prematurely. Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

A new study finds that many household goods degrade air quality more than once thought.

On the final day of April 2010, unbeknownst to most locals, a small fleet of specialists and equipment from the U.S. government descended on the seas and skies around Los Angeles.

A “Hurricane Hunter” Lockheed P-3 flew in from Denver. The U.S. Navy vessel Atlantis loitered off the coast of Santa Monica. Orbiting satellites took special measurements. And dozens of scientists set up temporary labs across the basin, in empty Pasadena parking lots and at the peak of Mount Wilson.

This was all part of a massive U.S. government study with an ambitious goal: Measure every type of gas or chemical that wafted by in the California air.

Jessica Gilman, a research chemist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was one member of the invading horde. For six weeks, she monitored one piece of equipment—a kind of “souped-up, ruggedized” instrument—as it sat outside in Pasadena, churning through day and night, measuring the amount of chemicals in the air. It was designed to detect one type of air pollutant in particular: volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. VOCs are best known for their presence in car exhaust, but they are also found in gases released by common household products, like cleaners, house paints, and nail polish.

Outside powers have been central to the nuclear crisis—but for a few peculiar weeks in February.

Of all the arguments in favor of allowing North Korea to leap into the spotlight with South Korea at the Winter Olympics—what with its deceptively smiley diplomats and even more smiley cheerleaders and the world’s most celebrated winless hockey team—one hasn’t received much attention. “It’s tragic that people of shared history, blood, language, and culture have been divided through geopolitics of the superpowers,” Talia Yoon, a resident of Seoul, toldThe New York Times when the paper asked South Koreans for their thoughts on the rapprochement between North and South Korea at the Olympics. “Neither Korea has ever been truly independent since the division.”

In this telling, having Korean athletes march under a unification flag at the Opening Ceremony and compete jointly in women’s hockey isn’t just about the practical goal of ensuring the Games aren’t disrupted by an act of North Korean aggression, or the loftier objective of seizing a rare opportunity for a diplomatic resolution to the escalating crisis over Kim Jong Un’s nuclear-weapons program. It’s also about Koreans—for a couple surreal weeks in February, at least—plucking some control over that crisis from the superpowers that have been so influential in shaping it over the past year.